Tuesday, October 10, 2006

Tool: Zotero:Organize Your Research Resources


Zotero [zoh-TAIR-oh] is a free, easy-to-use Firefox extension to help you collect, manage, and cite your research sources. It lives right where you do your work — in the web browser itself.

Zotero is a production of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. It is generously funded by the United States Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.


" Zotero is a free, easy-to-use research tool that helps you gather and organize resources (whether bibliography or the full text of articles), and then lets you to annotate, organize, and share the results of your research. It includes the best parts of older reference manager software (like EndNote)—the ability to store full reference information in author, title, and publication fields and to export that as formatted references—and the best parts of modern software such as del.icio.us or iTunes, like the ability to sort, tag, and search in advanced ways. Using its unique ability to sense when you are viewing a book, article, or other resource on the web, Zotero will—on many major research sites—find and automatically save the full reference information for you in the correct fields.

The 1.0 beta release of Zotero already provides advanced functionality for gathering, organizing, and scanning your research, as well as basic import/export capability and bibliographic formatting tools. Automatic updates to the software in the fall and winter of 2006-2007 will provide many more citation styles, the ability for Zotero to recognize even more online resources, even better support for importing and exporting entire collections, and integration with Microsoft Word and other word processors. And coming soon, Zotero users will be able to share their collections with other users, collaborate on research projects using Zotero, send their collections to other free web services (such as mapping or translation sites), and receive recommendations and feeds of new resources that might be of interest. In short, over the next year Zotero will expand from an already helpful browser extension into a full-fledged tool for digital research and communications. But there’s no need to wait: you can get started with your own Zotero library right now by downloading the public beta."

Features:

1.Automatic capture of citation information from web pages

2.Storage of PDFs, files, images, links, and whole web pages

3.Flexible notetaking with autosave

4.Fast, as-you-type search through your materials

5.Playlist-like library organization, including saved searches (smart collections) and tags

6.Platform for new forms of digital research that can be extended with other web tools and services

7.Runs right in your web browser

8.Formatted citation export (style list to grow rapidly)

9. Free and open source


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